Tewksbury Police Dept Paid Ransom in Ransomware Attack

After the police department’s administrative team detected the arrest and criminal record system being difficult to access, the organization called in a technician to assist with what seemed to be a minuscule issue with the system’s optimization. Following the system slow-down is when the organization received the ransom message stating the files were encrypted and a ransom would need to be paid in order to retrieve the files.

The cyber-attack on Tewksbury police proved so complex that specialists from federal/state law enforcement agencies, along with two private Internet security firms, could not unscramble the corrupted files. After five days of applied efforts to unscramble the encryption to unlock the files, Tewksbury police decided to pay the hacker the requested $500 in Bitcoins. Following the payment, all files were returned to the Tewksbury Police Department.

We have generated an interactive map that includes all of the ransomware attacks within the United States that have occurred this year.